In a recent webchat with Jon Miller, CMO of Demandbase, MarTechSeries discussed some of the most trending Account-based Marketing norms while diving deeper into why brands need to look at ABM as ABX  or Account-based Experience. If you’re wondering why ABM should be looked at as ABX: it’s because building out that fruitful and ROI driven end-to-end experience in this journey is what will help drive more value from this targeted business strategy. Dive in, for more!

Jon Miller, CMO at Demandbase chats about the evolution of ABX in this webchat with MarTechSeries – download now!

ABM has been around since years but is more in discussion and demand today with many of it’s typical features evolving constantly. This is primarily because of the need to be more precise and targeted to get more value out of every outreach in B2B.

In the past, brands cared about how many people responded to them, without necessarily looking into aspects like whether those prospects who were responding or engaging were a right fit for the product or brand.

In the past, marketing and even ABM often took on a more: fishing with nets approach.

ABM which is often known as a fishing with spears (instead of nets) concept is a method of identifying the highest value accounts a brand would like to sell to and then finding impactful ways to drive deeper engagement within those accounts: by identifying the right buyers and buying groups within them and effectively modeling campaigns to move them through the buying stages in a more targeted and precise manner.

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What B2B Marketers Should Understand About ‘’Traditional ABM’’ and ABX

The traditional ABM model has often been considered flawed because many times, brands would reach out to accounts that were not necessarily interested in their product, or, those accounts might not have been in-market at that point.

This is why ABM should be looked at as ABX today: a common question that always needs answering in ABX: are you building the right experience based on your target account’s current interest? This helps keeps B2B marketers and sales teams on their toes when it comes to formulating the right strategy and impact.

The core of doing ABX is aligning your strategy and go-to market model based on where that target account is in the overall buying journey; identifying whether they are in the awareness, consideration, or decision stage is key to planning campaigns and next steps.

What B2B marketers may often forget is that a bunch of their accounts are probably sitting at each of these stages but they haven’t broken down which ones are at what stage. If a company is still at the awareness stage, it is important to build awareness of the business problems that your brand can help solve. At the awareness stage, what matters more is building brand preference.

At the consideration stage though: target accounts are at a point where they realize they have a problem and are looking for a solution and in ABX or modern ABM, this is when a brand needs to identify that a target account is at this stage and is seeking relevant solutions. This is where marketing teams need to closely monitor whether prospects and buying decision makers from within certain target accounts have suddenly started engaging with the brand’s content or website, if they are, this means they are probably valuating vendors and you are one of them.

In traditional fishing with nets model this is where marketing usually hands off a lead to sale.

But in ABX: marketing and sales have to continue working together here and beyond to build consensus and validation.

The advantage of ABX – it takes marketing out of the title. The problem with ABM is that it is looked at as a marketing strategy but ABX gives it a bigger umbrella. It acts as an overall go-to market strategy.

Common Hurdles in ABX and Key Secrets to Success

Some of the most common challenges or problems that slow down ABX effectiveness include:

• Targeting too many accounts
• Using the wrong metrics to measure success
• Ineffective alignment between Marketing and Sales

B2B teams (marketing and sales, together) need to define the value of an ABX strategy: so that they can put more resources behind the accounts that are most valued and fewer resources behind the less valuable accounts. This is why having a Tier based strategy helps.

Building a Tier based strategy:

This involves the process of selecting which accounts are worthy of the majority of resources. Not having focused resources to drive engagement with your Tier 1 accounts for instance will affect the quality and preciseness as well as personalization of an ABX approach.

Before picking accounts, define entitlements – create different tiers:

What should make for a Tier 1 account: bigger target accounts (key accounts) need more focus and should be your Tier 1 target. It is important to therefore finalize which accounts could fall into this bracket and then, in terms of budgets for email marketing or ads or direct mail allocate more resources. Marketing and sales need to work together on what kind of premium content to put in front of them.

For Tier 2 or Tier 3 and Tier 4 accounts, the budgets, processes and models will accordingly keep changing.

Using tactics to then divide these accounts based on priority between sales reps helps drive that deeper engagement and value, because it allows reps to truly understand their highest value accounts and the key people within it.

At Demandbase for instance: each rep has 03 Tier 1 accounts, 30 Tier 2 accounts and 100 Tier 3 accounts. The rest (about another 1000) would be their Tier 4 accounts.

Alignment Between Marketing and Sales is More Than Just Crucial

In the old fishing with nets model, sales and marketing worked like as if they were in a relay race. It was more a linear approach.

A better way to drive ABX success is to look at the two teams as a football match, pass the ball (or target account in this case) back and forth to achieve a common goal (outcome). This requires the two teams to work together, in different ways.

What Helps Here:

• Defining your entitlements is key here
• Marketing should not be the one picking the accounts! Marketing should grab the relevant data and intel about the target accounts and pass this data to sales teams. Sales should use this to pick their top Tier 1 and Tier 2 and other accounts.
• A sales leader needs to act as the captain of this orchestrated football team with the support of the entire business.

Get Hurdles and Standups Done as Often as you can

It is important to have a stand up. Standups are common in agile software development models and teams. This consists of regular meetings every week of about 15 to 20 minutes just to sync up to discuss particular reps target accounts: what’s happening in those accounts and what can be done to achieve the common goal – it’s more like a huddle before the game – what can we do together to win the deal.

Don’t Fight For Credit

The final piece lies in getting the metrics right. If you are trying to assign credit to marketing or sales, this will hurt the team work and alignment. It is not about one team versus the other (marketing versus sale). Both the teams need to have shared goals, shared processes and constant feedback flowing between the two on the status of target accounts.

Operations lies at the core of every successfully scaled ABX program

Data, technology, process have to come together to drive all of the above and this is where a strong ops team matters.

Focus on Quality

Are you creating the right kind of opportunities for the right people at the right account?

Measure the quality of relationship with the top accounts: are they more engaged with the brand over time, keep in mind – if an account wants to buy into your product, they will first start by spending more time on your website, on your campaigns, and there will be higher engagement on your social media by those accounts. This is where marketing needs to be on top of measurement norms.

Next, it is important to rethink the funnel: stop thinking about MQLs and SQLs and lead based waterfalls. Take that target account journey into view and use it to measure progress. If you have 100 target accounts and they were at the awareness stage, how many moved to the consideration stage. Tracking all of this with specific goals can boost how brands optimize and measure their ABX outcomes.

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